The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,39

and checking myself in the mirror for weight gain.

Then the parcel had come. I had limped to the door and taken it from the postman without hesitation. But as soon as I had taken it I had known there was something wrong with it. It looked like it should have been heavier than it was, but when I had it in my hands it felt unnaturally light. It felt unnatural. There it still was. I wasn’t wrong. It was odd. The writing on it was a crazy person’s writing, scrawled all over the place. It was funny to see the address of our house in that unstable writing. The brown paper was old and soft, sellotaped very stiffly all over, as if it were a kind of shell rather than a parcel. It looked as if it had been going around the postal system for years. But it was postmarked yesterday. I couldn’t make out where from.

I blinked. I was being paranoid. It was a side-effect. It looked nothing more than, nothing worse than, an old-fashioned sci-fi TV programme prop, some pretend-evil creature with a name like molluscopod jerkily sliming across a makeshift landscape to evil synthesizer music chasing the sidekick girl.

I tried to think this, but the parcel defied me. It had been sent. It had been meant for someone.

I picked it up and carried it through to the kitchen and put it on the table, then I had a terrible urge to wash my hands. After this I went back through to the couch and switched on the TV. I watched the quiz where people are given random consonants and vowels and have to make up words. Then I watched another where people are eliminated if they give enough wrong answers. In the ad break I went back through to the kitchen. I had to. It was there on the table, too close to things in the fruit bowl that we would eventually eat.

I broke a banana off the bunch and poked the parcel over a few inches, away from the bowl, right to the edge of the table. I went to put the banana in the bin, holding the end which had touched the parcel well away from me. This was when you arrived home.

Why are you throwing away a perfectly good banana? you asked.

Then you looked at the parcel.

You looked at the writing on the parcel, the name and address. You picked it up and shook it. You shook your head. You looked at me. I shook my head too. You put it back down on the table and we both stepped back. We stared at it for a while. Then you said: it’s something horrible, isn’t it?

I nodded.

What if we just opened it? you said.

Well, it’s something horrible. And it’s not addressed to us, I said.

All through supper it got harder to breathe. I could hardly swallow. I felt dizzier and dizzier. You looked pale, appalled. You sat on the carpet, leaned against the armchair. You didn’t eat; you flicked little bits of jalapeno off your pizza back into the pizza box.

What if, you eventually said, it had arrived here actually open? Split, you know, by accident.

Just split enough so we could see what was actually in it? I said.

Uh huh, you said.

I took the knife through and washed the pizza off it and dried it. You came through to the kitchen. You turned the parcel round on the table and took the knife. You cut right into it.

Christ, you said.

The smell was awful. We both stepped back. Then you took a deep breath, held your breath, unlocked the back door and took the sagging parcel and the knife outside. I heard you cough and I heard the ripping noise the knife made in the side of it. You coughed and then spat. I went out into the garden.

On the path beside the gaping parcel was a pile of filthy rags. The smell was foul.

Look, you said. I think it’s pyjamas.

There was a jacket and a pair of small trousers for a six or seven year old. They were dark blue under the filth, and patterned with soiled and ruined little pictures, a child dressed as a guardsman, a child on a hobby horse, a child in a sports car, a child making a sandcastle.

There was a note. It said, in the same wild ballpoint writing: W H o S A n A U G H t Y B o Y t H E n.

Well,